This is the summer of holidays at home

British holiday hotspots are reporting bumper bookings this summer as families
opt to stay at home.

Holidays at home: "Better the M25 in the rush hour than Gatwick in August"Photo: GETTY

By Max Davidson

7:00AM BST 25 Jul 2009

How typical. People tighten their belts, agonise, grit their teeth and decide to take their summer holiday in Cornwall instead of in the Caribbean – only to find that Cornwall is booked out.

So is the Lake District. So is Pembrokeshire. So are the Yorkshire Dales. So are the Norfolk Broads. All the really beloved UK locations, the places people would like to take a holiday if they could trust the British weather to behave itself, are reporting bumper bookings as recession-hit families opt to stay at home.

"We are getting a lot more inquiries than we have ever had before," says Derek Phillips, chairman of the Exeter Chamber of Commerce. "And it is mainly domestic holidays." In parts of the region, supply is struggling to meet demand.

"I've given up on Devon," says one friend, who has been surfing the net until two in the morning, checking out last-minute deals. "There just isn't anywhere left that the kids would like. Do you know if Shropshire is OK?"

She is starting to panic, like others, and wondering whether a cheap family holiday on the Med might be viable, after all. But she is no fool. She knows that the kind of bargain-basement package holidays that look too good to be true are too good to be true: they will be blighted by drunken English rowdies, their brains frazzled by the sun. So Shropshire it will probably be. Or, if not Shropshire, Northumberland or Ayrshire.

She is not alone. According to one survey, up to a fifth of Britons who took an overseas holiday last year will be forsaking the Dordogne for Dorset, the Greek islands for the Scilly Isles, Majorca for Scarborough.

The "staycation" has become a fact of recession life. That is good news for the British tourism industry, offsetting the reduced numbers of visitors from overseas; but while hoteliers are smiling, not all their customers are happy.

There are still hotel rooms and self-catering holidays available, but people booking at the last minute, perhaps with an eye on the five-day weather forecast, have been in for a nasty shock.

That dirt-cheap crofter's cottage on Skye, where one can turn the clock back to the 1950s and have a retro family holiday, playing board games and cooking sausages over an open fire, turns out to be a mirage. The cottage is sandwiched between a housing estate and a wind farm and is going to cost an arm and a leg. Even 1950s retro chic comes at a price.

Modern-day Britain is one of the most expensive countries on the planet; and it can be pretty dispiriting to be reminded how exorbitantly expensive some British hotels and restaurants are.

Still, there is a silver lining in the cloud. It is rather un-British to focus on silver linings, without having a good long moan about the clouds, but focus we must; otherwise, we will all spend the whole summer wallowing in self-pity, as the rain sweeps in over the Pennines or the Brecon Beacons.

The silver lining can be simply stated. A stay-at-home holiday is not just simpler and cheaper than an overseas holiday but, if you shop around, significantly simpler and cheaper. It is easy to make a crude comparison between renting, say, a farmhouse in the Languedoc and a cottage in Devon and think that, if both cost £800 per week, the French property represents better value. But that ignores all the add-ons: the cost of getting to France and the cost of living once one gets there, with the pound and the euro at near parity.

My partner and I have just spent five nights in the south of France, taking a low-cost airline to Marseille, hiring the cheapest car available, staying at two-star hotels, eating at pretty modest restaurants. We expected to get change from £1,000. Dream on! Some European countries may still be relatively inexpensive compared with Britain, but la belle France is not one of them.

As for the hassle factor, it is hard to underestimate the sheer energy-sapping misery of air travel in high summer. Queue after queue after queue, each more bad-tempered than the last. Better the M25 in the rush hour than Gatwick in August. What is the point of heading for the sun if you are hot under the collar before you arrive?

Once families have decided to forsake their normal fortnight in France or Italy in favour of somewhere closer to home, they will soon realise that they'll have more disposable income on holiday than they expected: money that can be spent on hiring a baby-sitter for an evening; or on eating out rather than eating in.

All of which is good news for the economy generally. A survey in June by Sainsbury's suggested that people will spend £43 billion on holidays this summer, with 63 per cent of that spend, or just over £27 billion, staying in Britain. Pubs and cafés have been closing all over the country as the credit crunch starts to bite. Bumper takings in July and August could give them a stay of execution. The same applies to many other small businesses in areas traditionally dependent on tourism.

Economists may disagree about how long and deep the recession will be; but if people can do their bit for the environment by recycling milk cartons, they can certainly do their bit to kick-start the economic recovery by spending their money on British goods and services – which they cannot do on a beach in Spain.

Some parts of the economy are already booming as a direct result of the downturn. The Caravan Club has reported that advance bookings in 2009 are 40 per cent up on a year ago. Sales of camper vans, once the last refuge of the impoverished surfer, have doubled. And the market in static homes, or fixed caravans, is also booming.

"We thought we would struggle, but no," says Christine Seddon-Kaye, who runs a caravan park in Devon. People are shelling out between £16,000 and £100,000 on static homes, and not just as a property investment. "It is more a lifestyle thing."

Treat the need to forgo your accustomed foreign holiday as a catastrophe, and it will be a catastrophe – something that makes you feel miserable for weeks. Treat it as an opportunity – to try something different, re-connect with simpler pleasures, rediscover wonderful parts of Britain you had forgotten existed – and you could be in for a pleasant surprise. A little temporary belt-tightening could end up feeling like an adventure, not a deprivation.

This weekend, in keeping with the times, we will be sleeping under canvas in the Cotswolds, enjoying a camping break with friends. No hassle, no stress and, in logistical terms, only one outstanding question. Do we have a barbecue tonight or splash out at the local gastro-pub? My vote is to have a barbecue, then go to the pub, and I seem to be winning the argument. The recession has not extinguished the pleasure principle.

It is not a lavish holiday, but it is a holiday, and if we do not enjoy it, we will have only ourselves to blame.